The Runaway Countess. Amanda McCabe

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      ‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’ Jane asked.

      ‘I saw a patch of what looked like the plant I’ve been seeking by the road yesterday, but I didn’t have time to examine it properly,’ Emma answered briskly. ‘I want to collect a few pieces before they get trampled.’

      ‘It looks like rain,’ Jane said. ‘And we have guests coming to tea soon.’

      ‘Do we? Who? The vicar again?’ Emma said without much interest. She put down Murray the puppy and clipped on his lead.

      ‘No, Sir David Marton and his sister Miss Louisa. Surely you remember them from the assembly last month?’ Their last real social outing, dancing and tepid punch at the village assembly rooms. Emma would surely remember it as she had protested being put into one of Jane’s made-over London gowns and had then been ogled and flirted with by every man between fifteen and fifty. Sir David had danced with her once, too, then he had spent the evening talking to Jane.

      ‘That old stick-in-the-mud?’ Emma said with a scoffing laugh. ‘What is he going to do, read us sermons?’

      ‘Emma!’ Jane protested. ‘Sir David is hardly old—I doubt he is even thirty. And he is not in the least bit sermon-like. He and his sister are very nice.’

      ‘Nice enough, I suppose, but still very stick-in-the-muddy. When he danced with me at the assembly he kept going on about some German philosopher with terribly gloomy ideas. He didn’t know anything about botany. And his sister only seemed to care about hats.’

      ‘Nevertheless, they are nice, and they are to be our nearest neighbours since they took over Easton Abbey,’ Jane said, trying not to laugh at her sister’s idea of proper social discourse. ‘You need to be here when they call. And properly dressed, not drenched from getting caught in the rain.’

      ‘I won’t be gone long at all, Jane, I promise,’ Emma said. ‘I will be all prim and proper in the sitting room when they get here, ready to talk about German philosophy over cakes and tea.’

      Jane laughed as Emma kissed her cheek and hurried away, Murray barking madly at her feet. ‘Half an hour, Emma, no more.’

      ‘Half an hour! I promise!’

      Once Emma was gone out the garden gate, Jane hurried through the kitchens, where their cook was making a rare fine tea of sandwiches and lemon cakes, and went up the back stairs to her chamber. Emma wasn’t the only one who needed to mend her appearance, she thought as she caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing-table mirror. She could pass as the scullery maid herself.

      And somehow it seemed so important that Sir David and his sister not think ill of her appearance.

      As she tugged the scarf from her hair and untied her apron, she thought about Sir David and their recent meetings. He was a handsome young man, in a quiet way that matched his polite demeanour. With his sandy-brown hair and spectacles, he seemed to exude an unobtrusive intelligence that Jane found calming after all that had happened before in her life.

      She enjoyed talking to him and he seemed to enjoy talking to her. When she had declined to dance at the assembly, saying only that her dancing days were behind her, he did not press her. But he was kind enough to dance with Emma and listen to her talk about plants, even though Emma seemed to find him ‘stick-in-the-muddy’.

      So when Jane had encountered him and his sister in the village, it seemed natural to invite them to tea. Only to be a friendly neighbour, of course. There could be nothing more. She was a married woman, even though she had not seen her husband in years.

      She was a married woman for now, anyway. And she could not quite deny that when David Marton smiled at her, sought her out for conversation, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time. She felt—admired.

      Even before she left London she had begun to feel invisible. The one person whose admiration mattered—her husband—didn’t see her any more and all the chatter in the fashion papers about her gowns and her coiffures didn’t matter at all. Nothing mattered beyond Hayden’s indifference. She started to feel invisible even to herself, especially after she had failed in her main duty to give her husband an heir.

      Back home at Barton Park she had started to feel better, slowly, day by day. She had started to feel the sun on her skin again and hear the birds singing. The weed-choked gardens didn’t care what she looked like and Emma certainly didn’t. Things seemed quite content. So it had come as quite a surprise how much she enjoyed Sir David’s quiet attentions.

      She leaned towards the mirror to peer more closely at her reflection.

      ‘No one in London would recognise you now,’ she said with laugh. And, indeed, no one would recognise the well-dressed Lady Ramsay in this woman, with her wind-tossed hair and the pale gold freckles the sun had dotted over her nose. She reached for her hairbrush and set to work.

      She suddenly felt giddily schoolgirlish in how much she looked forward to this tea party.

      Chapter Three

      ‘Ramsay? By Jove, it is you! Blast it, man, what are you doing in this godforsaken place?’

      Hayden slowly turned from his place at the bar. He had just been asking himself that very thing, What was he doing in a country inn, sipping at tepid, weak ale, running after a woman who clearly didn’t want him, when he could be in London, getting ready for a night out at balls and gambling clubs?

      He had just come to the startling realisation that a night out gaming and drinking wasn’t something he would miss very much when he heard those shouted words. They were a welcome distraction from his own brooding thoughts.

      He turned away from the bar and saw Lord Ethan Carstairs making his way across the crowded room towards him. Lord Ethan was not what Hayden would call a friend, but they were often in the same circles and saw each other at their club and across the gambling tables. Lord Ethan was rather loud and didn’t hold his liquor very well, but he was tolerable enough most of the time. Especially at moments like this, when Hayden needed distraction.

      ‘Lord Ethan,’ he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. Can I buy you an ale?’

      ‘I won’t say no to that,’ Ethan said affably as he leaned against the bar next to Hayden. To judge by his reddened cheeks and rumpled hair, and the dishevelled state of his expensive clothes, he had been imbibing the ale for quite a while already. ‘My damnable uncle is making me rusticate for a while. Says he won’t increase my allowance until I learn some control and I am completely out of funds.’

      ‘Indeed?’ Hayden asked without much interest as he gestured to the innkeeper for more ale. Everyone knew that Ethan’s Puritanical uncle, who also held the Carstairs family purse-strings, disapproved of his nephew’s wild ways. Hayden sympathised. His own father had so often been disapproving.

      And now here he was, drowning his doubts in drink. Just like his father. That was certainly something he did not want to think about.

      ‘Most unfair,’ Ethan grumbled. He took a long gulp from his glass, the reached into his pocket and took out a small, gold object he twirled through his fingers. Hayden recognised it as an old Spanish coin the man often used as a lucky charm at the card tables. ‘I’m on my way to some country pile to wait him out. But what are you doing so far from town?’

      Hayden СКАЧАТЬ